The Core Of Language And Recursion

[Travis]

Chomsky has long advocated that language is innate with a core universal structure. At the root of this structure is the concept of recursion: that sentences can be made longer and longer with the addition of concepts joined with specialized words sort of like what I am doing with this sentence right here which I can make longer and longer even though it starts to be clunky.

But, there is a small minority of linguists who argue language stems from humans using our brains to merely overcome the obstacles of communication. They bring up a tribe from the Amazon as a rebuttal since their language has no identifiable recursion in it. Their sentences are always short and in the present tense.

The adherents of Chomsky have basically blacklisted the very idea. They refuse to have people speak in their schools about the concept, they refuse to let their students study papers related to it and they have even convinced the Brazilian government to not allow any more researchers that push the idea to interview members of the tribe that started the whole controversy.

Is this right? It seems like an awfully anti-scientific viewpoint and action to even refuse to entertain the idea or allow anyone to study it. And what of the idea itself? Is it feasible to believe that a language could develop without recursion?

 

[fuelair]

Personally, I believe it is just Chomsky - he is crap in other fields (notoriously so in politics and functions thereunto which is a field in which I have not heard he has any trining for - merely a set of ill thought out (by my standards, granted) points he likes to push). This may well account similarly to his attitude on other ways of looking at/analysing linguistic matters. Or, perhaps he just wants those crazy kids to get offa his lawn!!!!

 

[angrysoba]

Chomsky has long advocated that language is innate with a core universal structure. At the root of this structure is the concept of recursion: that sentences can be made longer and longer with the addition of concepts joined with specialized words sort of like what I am doing with this sentence right here which I can make longer and longer even though it starts to be clunky.

But, there is a small minority of linguists who argue language stems from humans using our brains to merely overcome the obstacles of communication. They bring up a tribe from the Amazon as a rebuttal since their language has no identifiable recursion in it. Their sentences are always short and in the present tense.

The adherents of Chomsky have basically blacklisted the very idea. They refuse to have people speak in their schools about the concept, they refuse to let their students study papers related to it and they have even convinced the Brazilian government to not allow any more researchers that push the idea to interview members of the tribe that started the whole controversy.

Is this right? It seems like an awfully anti-scientific viewpoint and action to even refuse to entertain the idea or allow anyone to study it. And what of the idea itself? Is it feasible to believe that a language could develop without recursion?

I would be surprised if that is an accurate account of either the language in the Amazon that you speak of or of the academic dispute.

For one thing, languages only having a present tense will not be a problem for many things if there are other language markers other than morphology to show different times. English, for example, has no future tense but we have no trouble talking about what we are going to do next week. Lots of claims have been made about lots of languages going back to Benjamin Whorf's imaginitive theories about the Hopi.

Which language is being talked about this time? Is it the Piraha?

"Adherents of Chomsky" could cover a lot of ground. Not everything he has said on language has been accepted universally but some theories he has advocated have been far more generally accepted than others. Largely the idea that there are stages of acquisition in which children "hypothesise" deep-structure seems to be well-accepted now, as far as I know. Other claims he makes are less well accepted.

Are you sure that these advocates lobbying the Brazilian government have urged no further research on the basis that they feel their pet theories will be debunked or are we talking about indigenous advocacy groups? Or is there some "scientific" motive for preventing the language being contaminated before it can be properly studied?

It sounds interesting, but I think you'll need to add more details before we can discuss this properly.

 

[angrysoba]

Personally, I believe it is just Chomsky - he is crap in other fields (notoriously so in politics and functions thereunto which is a field in which I have not heard he has any trining for - merely a set of ill thought out (by my standards, granted) points he likes to push). This may well account similarly to his attitude on other ways of looking at/analysing linguistic matters. Or, perhaps he just wants those crazy kids to get offa his lawn!!!!

I think one of the main areas of argument is between the innatist/nativist school of which Chomsky and Pinker are two of the best known advocates, and the connectionist/emergentist school of which people like Tomasello and a number of others advocate.

 

[theprestige]

Chomsky has long advocated that language is innate with a core universal structure.

Citation needed.

At the root of this structure is the concept of recursion[...]

Citation needed.

But, there is a small minority of linguists who argue language stems from humans using our brains to merely overcome the obstacles of communication.

Citation needed.

They bring up a tribe from the Amazon as a rebuttal since their language has no identifiable recursion in it. Their sentences are always short and in the present tense.

Citation needed.

The adherents of Chomsky have basically blacklisted the very idea.

Citation needed.

They refuse to have people speak in their schools about the concept, they refuse to let their students study papers related to it and they have even convinced the Brazilian government to not allow any more researchers that push the idea to interview members of the tribe that started the whole controversy.

Citation needed.

I mean, it's obvious that you have been consuming evidence and arguments on this topic. Why have you chosen not to present those here, in this thread inspired by them?

 

[Brian-M]

Chomsky has long advocated that language is innate with a core universal structure. At the root of this structure is the concept of recursion: that sentences can be made longer and longer with the addition of concepts joined with specialized words sort of like what I am doing with this sentence right here which I can make longer and longer even though it starts to be clunky.

The idea that language is innate and the idea that language requires the capacity for recursion are two separate concepts. They're not interchangeable, so I wonder why you start by bringing up the idea that language is innate in your first sentence, and then switch to the idea that language requires recursion for the rest of the paragraph. You don't provide any connection between the two ideas, except possibly their link to Chomsky.

But, there is a small minority of linguists who argue language stems from humans using our brains to merely overcome the obstacles of communication. They bring up a tribe from the Amazon as a rebuttal since their language has no identifiable recursion in it. Their sentences are always short and in the present tense.

According to Wikipedia, the language of the tribe you refer to is the Pirahã language.

From the Wikipedia page on the Pirahã language.

Everett claims that the absence of recursion, if real, falsifies the basic assumption of modern Chomskyan linguistics. This claim is contested by many linguists, who claim that recursion has been observed in Pirahã by Everett himself, while Everett argues that those utterances that superficially seemed recursive to him at first were misinterpretations caused by his earlier lack of familiarity with the language. Furthermore, some linguists, including Noam Chomsky himself, argue that even if Pirahã lacked recursion, that would have no implications for Chomskyan linguistics.​

 

[The Man]

Chomsky has long advocated that language is innate with a core universal structure. At the root of this structure is the concept of recursion: that sentences can be made longer and longer with the addition of concepts joined with specialized words sort of like what I am doing with this sentence right here which I can make longer and longer even though it starts to be clunky.

Well communication certainly seems to be innate. Even for the procreation of nonvocal animals.

But, there is a small minority of linguists who argue language stems from humans using our brains to merely overcome the obstacles of communication. They bring up a tribe from the Amazon as a rebuttal since their language has no identifiable recursion in it. Their sentences are always short and in the present tense.

Visual, chemical or other, say auditory, clues have their limitations. So yes language is a development to use specialized sounds (words) to express complex ideas. While writing makes these sounds visual that does detract from the fact that other visual representations, say pictographs, have limitations that needed to be overcome.

The adherents of Chomsky have basically blacklisted the very idea. They refuse to have people speak in their schools about the concept, they refuse to let their students study papers related to it and they have even convinced the Brazilian government to not allow any more researchers that push the idea to interview members of the tribe that started the whole controversy.

"Uggh" may carry a huge sociological meaning, but "uggh glugg". Now have I narrowed the scope of "uggh" or expanded it? You might get different answers from different people because, well, language ain't "innate with a core universal structure". That's why definitions are just current common usage.


As Brian-M notes above language being innate and/or recursive aren't mutually dependent nor exclusive. It just works out better, communication wise, if the latter part of this sentence is directly relatable to the former, while expanding on it further to try to give more detail and specificity but if my spleen is lacking monocytes, then what the heck I could make this sentence even longer and lacking any recursion.

Is this right? It seems like an awfully anti-scientific viewpoint and action to even refuse to entertain the idea or allow anyone to study it. And what of the idea itself? Is it feasible to believe that a language could develop without recursion?

What's to study? Language could develop without recursion but then the communication depends more on the context than the text (what is not said but understood from the common sociological implication vs. what is directly said). Thus more open to personal interpretation. Formal languages develop by recursion, the latter referring specifically to the former. Without that, my spleen would rupture from the immutable proclivity of inane retributions.

 

[angrysoba]

Language being innate and language being recursive are indeed two distinct things and need not be mutually dependent, but it seems that the reason for this being important in this debate is that in some article written by Chomsky and Marc Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch, they may have identified it as the feature of human communication and only human communication, as opposed to those of other animals, hence under some definitions it is what makes it a language. As other animals are not able to use a recursive (and I think in this debate, the important thing is infinite recursivity) system of communication, they do not use language.

This specific claim which may or may not only exist in one journal article, was challenged by Daniel Everett who, oh...you can read about it here:

http://chronicle.com/article/Researchers-Findings-in-the/131260/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Anyway, some of the features that Daniel Everett has discovered about the Piraha are actually quite common among "primitive" tribes who very often only have "numbers" for things like one, a couple, a few, many rather than cardinal numbers.

 

[angrysoba]

A bit more commentary on the issue from Geoffrey Pullum:

8. So now nothing is at issue. Continuing work by Everett with Edward Gibson of MIT is still attempting to determine whether “recursion” of any kind is found in Pirahã: Gibson thinks textual evidence of appositional noun phrases might argue for it, and Everett doubts that. If Everett is right, it shouldn’t surprise anyone: Chomsky’s MIT colleague Kenneth Hale claimed years ago that Walbiri, an Australian aboriginal language, was similarly recursion-free, and other such languages have been reported. But Chomsky and his associates now believe it just doesn’t matter.

9. The anti-Everett movement now has no motivation. But the instigators have carried on regardless. Chomsky called Everett “a charlatan” in a Brazilian newspaper in 2009. Two followers, approached by Bartlett, imply (one quite directly) that Everett is faking data—grounds for formal charges if true, though no charges have been filed. Nastiest of all, as adumbrated by Bartlett and confirmed in the Times article, one Chomsky defender wrote to the Brazilian authorities (Funai) accusing Everett of racist attitudes toward the Pirahã, with the result that he was banned from Brazilian tribal areas, effectively making it impossible for him to do new field research.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/28/poisonous-dispute/

 

[Travis]

Citation needed.


Citation needed.


Citation needed.


Citation needed.


Citation needed.


Citation needed.

I mean, it's obvious that you have been consuming evidence and arguments on this topic. Why have you chosen not to present those here, in this thread inspired by them?

Well I wasn't aware of any actual links to articles on the matter but anrgysoba went and found some.

A bit more commentary on the issue from Geoffrey Pullum:





http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/28/poisonous-dispute/

Thanks. That is exactly what I was referring to.

 

[angrysoba]

Just to add that while it is all highly vituperative, it seems that both Everett and Chomsky agree that it really doesn't matter whether or not Piraha have recursion in their language.

However, Everett is against the idea of Universal Grammar/Language Instinct and says this in the comment box of Pullum's article:

I suppose I might mention that my new book, Language: The Cultural Tool, which sparked Bartlett's interest in reopening this controversy (and Schuessler's in the NY Times), has almost nothing to do with any of this. The only connection at all is that Piraha is one of many examples that I use in the book to make the case that there is no need to assume a language instinct or universal grammar. Take all the Piraha examples out and the central arguments and thesis of the book do not change one whit, nor does the overwhelming force of the evidence.

So, it seems the actual argument has been mischaracterized.

Also, I think some of the people involved just simply hate each other and they are having fun making fun of each other:

The most vicious, venomous contributor to this debate so far is Pullum. Good grief, how does he face himself in the morning.

How do I face myself in the morning? My god, it is hard. Most mornings the scowling visage of nightmarish hate that stares out of my mirror expecting me to shave it is so repellent and terrifying that I almost drop my whisky glass. It takes me a while to steady my nerves after I've seen myself. But usually after I've dismembered a few live puppies I feel a bit better.

 

[The Man]

A bit more commentary on the issue from Geoffrey Pullum:

8. So now nothing is at issue. Continuing work by Everett with Edward Gibson of MIT is still attempting to determine whether “recursion” of any kind is found in Pirahã: Gibson thinks textual evidence of appositional noun phrases might argue for it, and Everett doubts that. If Everett is right, it shouldn’t surprise anyone: Chomsky’s MIT colleague Kenneth Hale claimed years ago that Walbiri, an Australian aboriginal language, was similarly recursion-free, and other such languages have been reported. But Chomsky and his associates now believe it just doesn’t matter.

Yeah, I was going to remark on this before with a similar assertion in Brian-M's quote.


"Chomsky and his associates now believe it just doesn’t matter."


Looks like no further incursion into recursion is required.

 

[The Man]

Just to add that while it is all highly vituperative, it seems that both Everett and Chomsky agree that it really doesn't matter whether or not Piraha have recursion in their language.

However, Everett is against the idea of Universal Grammar/Language Instinct and says this in the comment box of Pullum's article:



So, it seems the actual argument has been mischaracterized.

Also, I think some of the people involved just simply hate each other and they are having fun making fun of each other:

Well I don't see any cursing or in return, re-cursing. So at least that language isn't re-cursive.









I'll get my hat.

 

[psionl0]

At the root of this structure is the concept of recursion: that sentences can be made longer and longer with the addition of concepts joined with specialized words sort of like what I am doing with this sentence right here which I can make longer and longer even though it starts to be clunky.

That's not how I learned the concept of recursion.

Of course to me Java, C and C++ are languages while English is a bunch of weasel words.

 

[Travis]

So how did the charge that this is "racist research" come about?

 

[angrysoba]

So how did the charge that this is "racist research" come about?

Travis, could you please cite the charge, preferably in quotes or with some kind of link to the charge rather than leave it up to the people reading to find out what it is you are referring to?

 

[Brian-M]

So how did the charge that this is "racist research" come about?

Searching this page for previous occurrences of the word "racist", all I find is in a quote from chronicle.com posted by angrysoba ...

one Chomsky defender wrote to the Brazilian authorities (Funai) accusing Everett of racist attitudes toward the Pirahã

No accusation of the research being racist. Only one person claiming that a specific researcher is behaving in a racist fashion toward the locals.

 

[Travis]

Uh, it was in your post.

one Chomsky defender wrote to the Brazilian authorities (Funai) accusing Everett of racist attitudes toward the Pirahã, with the result that he was banned from Brazilian tribal areas, effectively making it impossible for him to do new field research.

ETA: Ninjad!

I just don't see how that works. They accuse him of being racist. Why?

Also, in the documentary The Grammar Of Happiness the phrase "racist research" is specifically used.

 

[angrysoba]

Uh, it was in your post.




ETA: Ninjad!

I just don't see how that works. They accuse him of being racist. Why?

I don't know. It's too vague a reference to know, but I think that such accusations are commonly made about anthropologists in the field, often by other anthropologists for one reason or another.

Or, it could (I stress the word "could") be the idea that if Everett is saying the Piraha are so far removed from the norm of being able to speak language like any other human beings then he is effectively saying that they are not human. Or course, Everett himself is likely to dispute that given that he is disputing the underlying assumption that all human languages must have property X. Everett seems to be arguing that there are absolutely no necessary properties for a human language and no "universal grammar".

According to this blurb from his book Language The Cultural Tool:

For years, the prevailing opinion among academics has been that language is embedded in our genes, existing as an innate and instinctual part of us. In this bold and provocative study, linguist Daniel Everett argues that, like other tools, language was invented by humans and can be reinvented or lost. He shows how the evolution of different language forms—that is, different grammar—reflects how language is influenced by human societies and experiences, and how it expresses their great variety. Combining anthropology, primatology, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and his own pioneering research with the Amazonian Pirahã, and using insights from many different languages and cultures, Everett presents an unprecedented elucidation of this society-defined nature of language. In doing so, he also gives us a new understanding of how we think and who we are.

http://www.amazon.com/Language-The-Cultural-Tool-Vintage/dp/0307473805

I'm sure a number of objections could be raised that surely human genes must have some role in at least the preconditions for language for as Chomsky (and Pinker) are fond of saying, the housecat doesn't learn the same language as a baby introduced to the same household.

Perhaps, Everett explains this in his book - I would expect so - but has a more subtle target such as, possibly, that Chomsky et. al have a very narrow sense of what language is and seem to see sentence-level grammar as the key to language.

 

[angrysoba]

Also, in the documentary The Grammar Of Happiness the phrase "racist research" is specifically used.

Is this a documentary you have watched? If so could you give us all a bit of a clue as to the context in which this term was used?